In capability approach (CA) research, education is perceived as a capability in itself and also basis for development of other capabilities. The term capability here has broad meaning and it refers to what a person is able to do and be. On the other hand, it is contrasted to the term functionings, which refers to realized capabilities, or the final product, very often the focus of the research and policy attention (Nussbaum, 2011). Although providing new area of research interest, this approach is still developing its operationalization in research design. In that respect particularly Paul Ricoeur’s (1994) phenomenology of capable human being, provided to be useful and operational theory basis for developing research design. Ricoeur considered ‘capability to say’, ‘capability to act’ and ‘capability to tell’ to be the basic capabilities that lead to ‘capability of imputation’, i.e. a capacity of the person to be responsible for his or her own action. His approach is grounded on the idea that the responsibility for person’s own action comes through affirmative recognition by the environment.

If the classroom is taken to be one context unit, in order to develop child’s capabilities in Ricoeurian sense, he or she needs to receive its recognition through interaction with teacher and peers. Therefore, affirmative response of the teacher plays important role.

With the main focus on teachers, the aim of this paper is to present if and in what way teachers recognize the ‘other’ in the classroom, argued on the basis of their verbal reports obtained through video-stimulated recall interview, initial interview and observations of the classroom activities. This study presents teachers reasoning of classroom situations when pupils in some way ‘interpose’ the lesson. This revealed teachers’ perception of some aspects of pupils’ capability formation in everyday classroom context and if they recognize the ‘other’ or they developed only the relation towards the subject they teach.

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